How To Backup and Restore MySQL Database Using Command Line

In this tutorial, we will show you how to backup and restore the MySQL database using Command-Line. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL is an open-source database developed by Oracle whereas MariaDB is a fork of it that works similarly and uses the same command line as MySQL.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of backup and restore MySQL on a Linux server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu and any other Debian-based distribution or CentOS Linux.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo useror access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

The parameters of the said command are as follows.

• [uname] Your database username.
• [passwd] The password for your database (note there is no space between -p and the password).
• [dbname] The name of your database.
• [backupdb.sql] The filename for your database backup.

Backup and Restore MySQL Database Using Command Line

• Backup MySQL/MariaDB database

First, you can check MySQL databases from your server:

mysql -h localhost -u root -p
mysql> show databases;

The following command will dump all databases into an SQL file. Replace pass with your root database password and filename with the name of the file you wish to create such as backupdb.sql

Back up multiple databases in MySQL

$ mysqldump –u[uname] –p[passwd] [database name 1] [database name 2] > backup.sql

Example:

$ mysqldump –u root –pidroidus chedelics radiks > backup.sql

Backup all databases in MySQL

$ mysqldump –u [uname] –p[passwd] –all-databases > backup.sql

Example:

$ mysqldump –u root –pidroidus –all-databases > backup.sql

Back up your MySQL Database with Compress

$ mysqldump -u root -p[passwd] --databases [dbname] | gzip > backup.sql.gz

Example:

$ mysqldump -u root -pidroidus --databases  | gzip > backup.sql.gz

• Restore MySQL/MariaDB database from a backup file

Above we backup the Tutorials database into backupdb.sql file. To re-create the Tutorials database you should follow two steps:

• Create an appropriately named database on the target machine
• Load the file using the mysql command:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p create [dbname]

$ gzip -d backupdb.sql.gz #mysql -uroot -p[passwd] [dbname] < backupdb.sql

Example:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p create chedelics
$ gzip -d backupdb.sql.gz
$ backupdb.sql
$ mysql -uroot -pidroidus chedelics < backupdb.sql

Thanks for using this tutorial to backup and restore MySQL/MariaDB database using Command-Line. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official MySQL website.

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